Corner Gas star Brent Butt crafts film noir with No Clue

VANCOUVER — It’s night. And dampness mingles with the smell of diesel as a flashy dark flatbed decked out with a plunging camera crane and high-beams pulls out of the parking lot towing a rusty red Chevette.

It’s almost Chinatown, but not quite. Geographically, that’s four blocks south. Cinematically, it’s another world because this is the set of No Clue, a new noirish comedy scripted by Brent Butt and directed by Vancouver auteur Carl Bessai.

The story of Leo (Butt), an average guy who finds himself pulled into a web of intrigue when he falls for a duplicitous dame with a pretty face (played by Amy Smart), No Clue assumes the pose of a hard-boiled detective story, but with Butt’s somewhat doughy softness standing centre-frame, the whole feature finds a slightly offbeat — even awkward — feel.

“There’s a lot of similarities to stuff I have played before. Because I always say I act like Bob Hope. Whether he was a cowboy or a pirate or an astronaut, you kind of get that guy, you know?” says Butt, looking convincingly non-Hollywood as takes a break in the faux-panelled trailer.

“So there’s always going to be that glib shnook (in what I do), but the nice thing about this is it stretches it a bit.”

For the first time in his 25-year comedy career, Butt says he has to act more than he’s ever acted before.

“More than anything I’ve ever done on TV, this is a very real world that we’ve created,” says the veteran of television comedies Corner Gas and Hiccups.

“I wanted to make this a gritty mystery that would hold up if it wasn’t funny. So there is a murder, and fraud, and grit, and danger and all those things. We’re trying to maintain a realistic tone, which ultimately makes everything funny, so I have to really act to a degree that I haven’t before. You know, I’m playing terror — I’ve never done that before. I’m getting beaten up — and how do you respond to that?”

Befuddlement seems to be the fallback position for Butt’s character, and it’s on glowing display a few moments later as the Canadian comedy icon climbs into the red Chevette and clutches the wheel for his close-up.

“The humour just comes from this guy in the middle of it who is in over his head,” says Butt, somewhat matter-of-factly.

Bessai can relate. As the director of more than a dozen features, he has called the shots before, but he’s never really collaborated on a feature with a fixed script. Bessai’s traditional path is the one preferred by British writer and director Mike Leigh, where you hire a top-notch ensemble and let the actors create the drama through character improvisation.

“My job is to bring a cinematic eye to the movie,” says Bessai. “You know, Brent comes from a sitcom background, so his writing is talky and jokey and it’s fast — it’s Ping-Pong. And my job is to bring performances out from those around him (because) Leo is this fish out of water … a man who isn’t what he says he is.”

Indeed, Leo poses as a private eye to help Smart’s character find her missing brother, but the nice woman with the big blue eyes may be playing a ruse of her own — which has a tendency to happen in this brand of narrative.

Smart lights up at the suggestion that her character may have some dark roots lurking beneath her towheaded bob.

“She’s this damsel in distress and he falls for her,” says Smart. “But she’s not all she appears to be. To be honest, my character has two distinct sides to her so it’s been fun to find the balance between the two, but Carl has been great to work with,” she says.

“He keeps the takes going. He just keeps restarting, so you keep the energy up in the scene. You build a momentum and that way, you sustain the adrenalin rush.”

For co-star David Cubitt, the attraction of working with Bessai, Smart and Butt plays to the same craft-oriented curiosity.

After working in Los Angeles for seven years on the TV show Medium, Cubitt says he was hungry for a juicy role that let him play. “I love L.A., but I loathe the (L.A. scene). I hate the level of ambition that permeates the culture there. There’s a lot of detritus to get through,” he says.

“What we are doing here is the perfect contrast to seven years of television because TV generally is kind of routine and methodical and very conventional,” says Cubitt, who recently wrapped some flashback work on the new Vancouver-spun series Bates Motel, starring Vera Farmiga as Norman Bates’s still-fleshy matriarch.

“And Carl is like the leader of a jazz band out there. Everything is arrhythmic and dissonant and wonderfully musical. We did nine pages and five scenes (in a single day), with no lighting setups; nobody got a break for 12 hours. And it was one of the least fatiguing, best days I’ve ever had a on a shoot. Ridiculous, right?”

Ridiculous seems to fit the sentence, and the project as a whole — given it’s a Canadian film noir comedy featuring Butt behind the wheel of a 1980s crapbox car courting the likes of ingenue Smart.

“I’m sure there’s a little psychosis (in my humour). I’m the youngest of seven children and every once in a while I wonder: Did I get enough attention?” says Butt.

“If I could make my older brothers and sisters laugh, that was a high water mark.”

The highest degree of success was making his mother cry from laughter, which Butt says was possible if you did something goofy.

“If you made her laugh really hard, she’d make this strange, precious pup sound, a weird squeak. My brother has a picture of my mum in her rocking chair, wiping a tear from her eye in the middle of that laugh. To me, that will always be the image I have of my mother — cracking up.”

Butt says the lesson of her life approach sticks with him and keeps him north of 49.

“I feel I can be myself here,” says Butt. “That’s why I named my production company Sparrow Media — because sparrows are birds that don’t fly south. If I can make a product in Canada that sells around the world, that’s the realization of my life goal … and so far, it’s working out.”

No Clue wraps production in Vancouver Friday and is expected to this theatres in fall 2013.